Buttermilk (sort of)

Did you know you can make your own buttermilk, kind of? It probably isn’t of much use unless someone in your house is lactose intolerant, in which case it is very useful because you can use Lactaid milk to make it.

The recipe we had (from The Home Creamery by Kathy Farrel-Kingsley) said you could add either 2 tablespoons cream of tartar or 1 tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice to a cup of whole milk and let sit for 15 minutes at room temperature. In theory it should curdle the milk. (Sounds yummy right?)

Ours didn’t curdle but it did sour so we figured it would work for our recipe.

We make buttermilk biscuits from the same book. They had flour and cornmeal (but more of the former), cheddar cheese, parmesan and chopped scallions among other things. They came out delicious and huge and we ate them still warm with more margarine for good measure.

P.S. I mentioned in an earlier post that we brined pickles. The instructions for this command you to skim the scum off of the top of the crock of pickles everyday. At first we didn’t detect much scum but we still skimmed. Then all of a sudden we had scum. And when I say scum I mean there was an opaque lacy layer of white yuck on top of the water. Yet we still bravely continue to skim it off. I’m not sure how I’m going to feel about eating these pickles. The good news is that we tasted some of our bread and butter pickles and they are good. This weekend looks like it will be another marathon canning session.